Railroad. The “object” of representation before us, having somewhat lost its fascination? Or else a phenomenon, whose boundaries are in no way defined. Station, airport, post office, nodes of another lymphatic nature. In a place that is not logically expressed although it is well enough known, a place between representation and ideation, an “other materiality” arises. I do not remember why, several years ago, a desire to “rewrite the Trojan War” arose. Today, it seems like it was absolutely necessary, like any other random event, since “the shield of Achilles,” almost like an effaced coin buried in sand, under water, lay on the sea floor of history. The bottom of imagination appears like a future reflection. The important thing here isn’t that virtually everyone has undertaken the “description” of the shield, but rather that the shield has gradually taken on the features of the “Tower of Babel,” of a transposition machine. Thus instead of a sought-for photograph of a few lines that did not end up in the book Distribution owing to one’s own carelessness, there’s instead the unfinished state of “Trojan War.” I am interested not in the “why” of this change but rather in the “from what” of this change. However, they are easily interchangeable.

The translation projects represented in this feature on contemporary Russian poetry have been made possible by a high degree of close, lived contact — contact that circumvents and short-circuits older systems of baffles and filters (while, perhaps, instituting new ones). In this feature is translation as a form of intimacy. The result, a small sampling of which is included in the essays and translations published in Jacket2, is a new injection of the writings of contemporary Russian poets into the American scene, and a glimpse into formerly remote Russian poetic counterpublics.